The L&N passenger train pulled out of the station in Cumberland, and I was crying. I was to be 14 in a few days and had just completed my freshman year at Cumberland High School the day before.

I cried off and on all the way to Toledo: I was already missing my boyfriend, my friends, the Central Baptist Church, my relatives, the security I felt in living in a small town where I could have drawn from memory plots of all the stores in each block in downtown Cumberland. And I knew every stone, plant, and tree at the property where we had lived on the Cumberland River as well as the configuration of the mountains that reached up on either side of the river.

My family left to join my father who had been laid off from U.S. Steel at Lynch and had thumbed rides to Toledo where he was employed by the Mather Spring Company, one of the many backdoor suppliers to the great auto industry in Detroit. He left to find work, to feed his wife and children, and to provide a future for them that was impossible in Harlan County.

I adjusted to Toledo, found a new boyfriend, learned the city (beginning with the Toledo Public Library), and received a quality education at Woodward High School.

At graduation I knew I wanted to return to Kentucky to attend college, so I went to Cumberland College in Williamsburg on a scholarship and continued to develop the leadership skills I had begun in my high school days in Toledo.

Time passed after Cumberland and in that time, I acquired college degrees and professional experiences in education. Always, however, there were frequent trips to Harlan County, “home” as I called it.

In 1978, I returned to Harlan County as chief academic officer at Southeast Community College. I had only worked at a private four-year college and knew nothing about community colleges. My neighbor on Ivy Hill in Harlan, now deceased Professor Emeritus Gayle Lawson, became my mentor and introduced me to persons of influence and taught me how to serve the community through determining needs of students and prospective students and working to deliver those needs.

I flourished at Southeast, but eight years later new job opportunities from the world outside of Harlan County began to arrive at my doorstep, and I needed and wanted to test my newly acquired skills in that larger world. And I stepped into that larger world, ultimately landing as chancellor of a very large college in Orange County, Calif. And the lesson that I learned at Southeast applied in most important ways: it takes teams working together to address the issues of programming, funding and facilities as they reach out to the communities they are committed to serving.

We leave, but we never really leave as we discover, yes, we can take with us the power of mountain women, the spirituality of spending hours each week in church, the courage from the Bible verse we memorized as children, “I shall fear no evil for Thou are with me.” We leave with superior reading skills because of quality teachers at Cumberland Elementary School and the good fortune of having an extended family of Muriel and Viva Adams; we leave with memories of sitting on the banks of the Cumberland River hoping to catch a fish, swimming in the Cloverlick River, climbing Raven’s Rock;

We leave with the sound of the coal tipple running and the clink of the horseshoes hitting the metal stakes and stirring up the dust of the unpaved road.

But we always come back, whether we wake up in Texas or California or Ohio, to drink from the dipper at the well on Ruth Gilliam’s property, to come home, and to know we are blessed.

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(Editor’s note: A native of Cumberland and a graduate of The Ohio State University, Dr. Blevins has enjoyed success as president/chancellor of community colleges in Texas, California and Missouri. Her first such position was at Southeast Community College where she was employed in administrative positions from 1978-1986. Currently, she teaches ethics, communication, and humanities courses at Edison State Community College in Piqua, Ohio, and serves as a consultant for global telecom companies with the Training Solutions Group, Inc., whose president is Harlan County native Tess Lewis-Lemarr)